Note: this release was originally purchased as a cassette tape, later replaced by a CD.
In which Mr. Winwood attempts to get back to his '60s R&B roots. It's not his best album (that honor still goes to Arc of a Diver), but Roll With It was his biggest-selling album. FWIW, I like it slightly better than its predecessor, Back in the High Life.
Nominated for several Grammy awards, including Album of the Year, it only won one: Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical.
Peak on the US Billboard Top 200 chart: #1 (one week, August 20, 1988)
Peak on the Billboard Pop CD chart: #1
Peak on Billboard R&B albums chart: #93
Tracks: The title track is fantastic organ-drenched R&B (so much so that publishing rights organization BMI later had songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland credited with co-writing the thing). The title track also had an extended 12" remix because eighties.
Also good are Holding On, Put On Your Dancing Shoes, and Hearts On Fire. I don't know what to say about Don't You Know What The Night Can Do other than it was a very successful beer jingle (#6 Pop, #1 Rock, #2 AC) and the drums are way too hot in the mix.
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I usually skip the slower tunes The Morning Side and One More Morning (I see a pattern here).
Personal Memory Associated with this CD: You might be getting tired of hearing about it, but the title track from his album was a very big part of the Lost Summer of Mark, particularly an ill-advised couples trip to a beach house.
Previously revisited for the blog:
Back in the High Life (1986)
Arc of a Diver (1980)
I remember this album and Back In The High Life being incredibly popular when they came out. The singles all over the radio and everybody had a cassette or CD of one or both the albums. Winwood's great Eighties comeback coincided with that of Robert Palmer, who notched two huge albums of his own in 1985 (Riptide) and 1988 (Heavy Nova) as well as being a part of Power Station for their first album in 1985.
ReplyDeleteAnd I remember those commercials, soundtracked by Clapton and Genesis, who joined Winwood in peddling Michelob.
I knew a guy who had a couple of Michelob tapes he picked up FOR FREE (aka shoplifted) at the liquor store when he was buying Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers for his underage girlfriend. He offered to let me dub a copy of them but they didn't look like anything special - songs old and new with the word "night" in the title. Besides copying cassettes wasn't my thing though I had a sweet dual-dubbing deck.
Always full of ideas, he thought it would be an excellent idea to sell music in the liquor store, making it a one-stop party shop, whatever that means. He was an overnight clerk at 7-Eleven and got robbed so many times, he was fired because the owner thought he was in cahoots with the robbers (as far as I knew he wasn't and he did get clocked one time and was passed out for like two hours before a customer wandered in and found him) and I never saw him again.
I worked with his girlfriend, who was both way too pretty and way too stupid for this world like a lobotmized angel, at the fast food restaurant that was my first job and one day she didn't come in for her shift. Saw her on the news that night, running from the police in the courtyard of her apartment complex before she was shot and later died at the hospital. This was maybe a year after her boyfriend got fired and disappeared but she wasn't broke up about it. Always had guys coming by to see her, bringing her gifts and asking her out like that was the way her life had always been and always would be.
Sorry, I got off topic.